Future-proofing audience targeting strategies with Audigent’s Drew Stein

For every marketer, engagement is key but conversion is crucial – especially in today’s economy. Finding audience solutions for growth in light of recent changes to the ad-tech landscape has not been an easy task, but they do exist and continue to defy industry constraints. 

On a recent episode of Alchemy, Jeff Ragovin, Chief Commercial Officer at Fyllo, sat down with Drew Stein, Co-Founder and CEO at Audigent, the leading data activation, curation and identity platform, to discuss reaching high-ROI audiences that take action, future-proofing audience targeting strategies and the growing importance of contextual targeting.

Jeff Ragovin: What initially got Audigent interested in partnering with Fyllo?

Drew Stein: Well, progressive audiences are hard to find. And when you think about what I'll call “big data” and the “big data companies”, there are a lot of similarities between the segmentation and taxonomy that they're building, right? There are only so many ways you can slice and dice financial audiences or health-related audiences or CPG audiences. And I think that the market is craving something different. 

We all know we want to tap into progressive audiences – The people who are willing to take the first step to become innovators and those audiences are very hard to come by. So from an audience perspective, when we thought about the partnership we knew this was something that truly no one else has in the market. A partnership just made complete sense because there's a massive demand for these kinds of groundbreakers out there. 

Jeff Ragovin: Are there any verticals in particular that you are seeing that align with testing these new audiences? 

Drew Stein: Apparel, beauty, luxury, CPG, auto and financial services. There are a number of brands that we see gravitating toward these first-mover audiences, these digital natives. They want to be able to speak to these audiences and we finally have a way to test and help brands identify what it is they're really looking for when they use a blanket term. For example, if a client says “I'm looking for millennials”, that's maybe what they say. But what they mean is that they're looking for these digital natives that are willing to take a risk or willing to try new things and try new brands and products. Fyllo data sets offer that in a way that is unique and speaks to it in a way that no one in the marketplace has yet to really uncover. 

Jeff Ragovin: What do you think the future of audience targeting will look like as we move towards a cookie-less future? 

Drew Stein: We know that cookies are deprecating and a lot of those deterministic identifiers will be harder to come by. We want to make sure that whatever we do next as an ecosystem champions consumer privacy. At Audigent, we believe the future is a combination of probabilistic and deterministic identity. 

Furthermore, the point of impression needs to be separated from the point of measurement at the point of impression. There's a very robust future around cohort-based targeting, which is far more privacy-centric. We’ve also seen that contextual targeting is getting more and more sophisticated and we believe what's next after contextual is predictive audience data.

What I like about Fyllo’s audiences is that they are terrific seed sets for thinking about predictive audience data as well that can be actioned against contextual sites which is why we're excited about these data sets because for the future they model really well in that they can be extended across a lot of different contextual touchpoints. 

Jeff Ragovin: When you're focusing on these audiences, what attributes to high ROI?

Drew Stein: It certainly starts with engagement. And then you have to find audiences that are willing to spend at the end of the day, right? You can have an audience that's engaged, but you can't seem to retarget or get them to move down the funnel. I think what's different with Fyllo, these are not just audiences that are willing to engage, but they're audiences that are willing to spend. 

It's not just finding audiences that like the products or services you have, but audiences that actually have the wherewithal to go all the way down to conversion. And that's something that we saw when we layered Fyllo audiences into our campaigns. 

Jeff Ragovin: And if you can target audiences in a granular way, you're making it easier for the customer to also get what they need, right?

Drew Stein: I couldn't agree more. And when you put an ad in front of someone that they generally engage with, that they actually want the product and there's utility there, you're doing them a favor and they appreciate it. One thing about the privacy conversation is that we want to be able to engage with people on a level that they're comfortable with when it comes to consumer protection. But if we go completely the other way and we are just randomly getting ads and we're not able to take advantage of some of the things that frankly make the Internet and the experience of consuming content better, we lose something. And so I, for one, am a consumer that doesn't mind being targeted. In fact, I prefer to accept all cookies and I prefer to be targeted with advertising versus completely, you know, getting random ads. 

Jeff Ragovin: What are you most excited about in 2023? 

Drew Stein: For Audigent, it's the continuing evolution of our partnerships on the SSP side. We are moving towards real-time data calls which will allow us to partner with SSPs in a way to really take advantage of our entire data stack. We've got a couple of early adapters where we are literally parking our servers, and co-locating our servers in the data centers with our SSP partners. It allows us to make real-time data calls and be a part of the bid stream with our partners’ data sets in a way unlike ever before. So what's most exciting for us in 2023 is real-time data integrations, allowing us to take advantage of all of our contextual and audience data stacks in a way that we previously haven't been able to achieve before.

This transcription has been paraphrased for editorial purposes. Listen to the full episode here.